Still here, got to start tear down this past sunday, to stay within budget were looking at just making it a 509 and then converting to roller cam. Bore was stock, supprised it had tiny domes in it already, figured stock would have been flat tops or even dished, heads are 188 castings, deffinantley going more modern than them.

Welcome back.

If I were you, I’d change the rods and pistons. For the cost of a rebuild on the rods, you can get better rods for just a little more money. And the pistons... they are a JE/SRP piece made for GM that use a metric ring pack that is expensive and allows some oil leakage into the combustion chamber. They are hard to find. A replacement set of pistons can be had for around $600 and rings for another $100 or so, both from JE/SRP.

The above is the route I took with mine.

how is this for the cam?, it fits your split and lsa criteria, melling 22472 duration @.050 237/245 lift .626/.639 lsa-112, I can get it new for under $200 and yes its a roller cam.

I would think that's a little small for a 540, you are probably better off calling someone like Bullet Cams for advice. I mostly run solid rollers.

Before you can select a cam, you really need to know what you're doing for heads.

For that price is it a cast cam ? OE GM amd Merc use steel cams even for black motors, not just blue.

I think you may be happier with that in the end. The reason I mentioned the Bravo is a 509 puts down the power a little more up top when the drive has had a chance to unbury itself instead of driving that 540 torque to it while it’s still mired deep. I’m just an Internet shade tree hack but that’s my understanding of it when I considered bigger power.

I'm going with the stroker 540, I figured that I can control the throttle to lessen the stress on the outdrive down low but torque × rpm is hp so ill let it sing on the top end. I purposely chose a mild comp cams extreme marine cam to avoid issues with reversion.

It's all in how you run it,

pretty sure the mkiv bowtie block 502’s had standard rings